This blog consists of comments from my real blog, http://scienceblogs.com/stoat/, which I don't want to publish there.
Plus some other stuff convenient to place here.
And its becoming a convenient place for me to dump my comments on other blogs so I can find them again.

Republican congresscritters is the opposite of <i>Democrat senatecritters</i>.

The opposite of science is <i>antiscience</i>: the active hostility to human discovery about nature. This hostility is exemplified when a supposed "scientist" says that if people he doesn't like ever hear there is a Freedom of Information Act now in the UK, he'd rather destroy a priceless library of knowledge about climate and weather rather than send to anyone.

William has steered this discussion onto the question of "is it illegal?" That could be true or not, but it is irrelevant. The point is that skeptics are constantly being accused of representing the interest of big oil in order to line their pockets. We are offered examples that are usually a few thousand dollars or so - typical consulting fees for a couple days work. Here is a professor that has an institute with some vague purpose, with a name containing the high-minded words "global", "environment" and "society", staffed by his family and friends. He gets $ 5.6 MM of government climate money to do, well, whatever it is that he does [can someone tell me what we got for this investment?]. This might be all legal, but it is still a scandal.